Well obviously it’s been a while since me or Krista have written anything. Krista was just busy graduation SIGNA CUM LAUDE at her University! No big deal! So she has her own legitimate reasons for being too busy to write, but with me, to be honest, I just haven’t been in the mood. Not to write, to READ!!!

At the start of the summer I set down the book I was currently reading and not that into and have barely picked up a book since. I slowly finished ONE book all summer, and have since started reading a second that’s going a bit better. I have never been in a kick this long where I don’t feel like reading. I don’t know if the summer is just too nice, or if my job is just keeping me too busy, but no matter what the reason, I don’t like it.

Has this ever happened to anyone else? If so, what can I do to get back in the reading mood? I have a pile over ten feet high of books on my TBR list and I just have no motivation to read them at all.

Any suggestions to get me reading again would be greatly appreciated. Fall is coming and that’s my favourite time of year to sit down with a nice book and a cup of tea!

“It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on…” ~~ Markus Zusak in The Book Thief

“Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear.” ~~ Markus Zusak in The Book Thief

From Lauren’s Perspective:

I spent the last hour trying to find the perfect quote to begin this review. What I was left with at the end was a page full of beautifully crafted quotations that all do justice to how amazing this story was. To pick just one seemed impossible, so I picked two.

This book was exquisitely written and profound in a way not many books are. There was meaning and a lesson on every page. The fact that this story was once again categorized as a book for Young Adults blows my mind. I have read many adult books and few of them are as amazing as this. I don’t even know where to begin.

Without spoiling the story, I will give away the key points. This novel is narrated by death and tells the story of a young girl living in a town in Germany during World War 2. She has a fascination with words, and as we follow her, she learns to read, write, and even tell her own story. Hers is one that is beautifully tragic and haltingly optimistic for such a heartbreaking story. Her life is hard in a way few of us can imagine and how she lives through it is remarkable. The stories main character, Liesel Meminger, begins as a precocious 11 year old who is abandoned by her only real family and left to live with complete strangers. She takes a liking to her foster father immediately, as Hans Hubberman is kind and smart and everything you could wish for in a role model. It takes longer for her to warm up to her foster mother, but despite Rosa’s gruff exterior, she is also loving and sensitive and wise. Watching their bond grow throughout the novel is fascinating to behold. They truly become one another’s family, tighter than blood, and it is the optimism that holds the story together through the terrifying war that killed millions.

The narrative is what really takes this story to another level. We, as readers, are given a view of Liesel’s life from the time her mother takes her to live with the Hubberman’s, until her death through death’s eyes himself. From his perspective, he writes, “I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn’t already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.” The beauty in death’s vision is the best way to experience this book. We are also given an interesting view of the war. We travel with death as he reaps the souls of the millions that died during this harrowing time, Germans and Jewish alike, and we are made to feel sorry for everyone who suffers. This unique perspective, and Zusak’s interesting style makes this novel into a true work of art. He litters the pages with definitions, spoilers, and facts about the war; he gives his reader multiple perspectives to consider, and he does so in such a way that leaves you almost breathless at the result. I can honestly say I have never encountered a novel quite as different and breathtakingly lovely as this.

Zusak crafts his words with such extreme care that you would be hard pressed to find a single word in this novel that didn’t fit exactly where it was as though it was destined to be in that sentence from the beginning of time. He writes, “His soul sat up. It met me. Those kinds of souls always do – the best ones. The ones who rise up and say “I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come.” Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out. More of them have already found their way to other places.” To speak of death in such a delicate way is a talent that few have managed as well as he has. He speaks of life, love, regret, belief, morals, and of course, death, with such care, you can feel the passion behind every word.

Above this already finely crafted novel, Zusak has created stories within his stories. He shows us picture book drawings from another character, Max, that riddle the pages with their interesting style and perfect knack for adding more wonder to this story.

These stories act as reminders of the importance of words, the importance of family and friends and the importance of story telling. I honestly cannot give enough praise to this perfectly put together novel.

There are so many brilliant quotes I still want to add to this review, but don’t for fear of spoiling the intricacies of the story, so I will leave saying this. Read this book. Read this book now. You will not regret it.

“But when I do feel all the strength go out of me, and I fall to my knees beside the table and I think I cry, then, or at least I want to, and everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.” – Veronica Roth in Allegiant

From Lauren’s Perspective:

I am going to write this, not as a separate review for each book, but instead as a collective. I read the first two books over a year ago and reread them before reading the final book in the trilogy. I feel that I don’t need to separate the books because they truly tell just one long story. It is the story of a girl named Tris.

I will begin by telling you how much I loved these books. I’m slightly biased because I love most Dystopian YA novels, of which I’ve read at least a dozen at this point, but this one, just like Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy, stand out above the rest. The writing is beautiful and poignant, the characters are flawed but likable, and the plot teaches the reader something about life.

Book one focusses on the very important theme of bravery. Throughout this story, Tris constantly finds herself wondering what it means to be brave. She questions her own bravery as well as those around her, and wonders if her choices in life are making her any braver than other choices might have done.

While learning all of this, Tris also develops her first friendships, her first crush, and her first enemy. She goes through many trials on her way to becoming a full “Dauntless” and while the reader can feel how hard the trials are she is suffering through are, it is also easy to predict that things are only going to get worse. Soon Tris stops asking whether she is brave or not, because her bravery is, time and again, put to the test.

Along with bravery, fear plays a hugely important role in this novel as well. Tris and the others must constantly overcome their fears, better themselves in order to make themselves stronger. Roth writes, “Becoming fearless isn’t the point. That’s impossible. It’s learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it.” These moments of revelation are scattered throughout the novel in thoughtful messages that allow Roth to convey her message, but also allow the reader to learn the lessons right alongside Tris. You’re never sure what side you are on while reading these books. There are good and bad people in every faction, there are good people that turn bad, bad people that turn good, and that confusion could distract from the story, but it doesn’t, it helps you question your own moral standings and it asks: How important is bravery to you? The clear answer Roth wants derived from this book is that bravery is everything, being brave means being good, and smart, and selfless, and honest. Being brave means being everything.

Roth does a magnificent job of introducing characters as well. You love Tris from the moment you meet her because of her mousy ways and reluctance to choose between what is right and what she wants, you love her because she is not confident yet, but you know she will be. Later, when we meet Four, you are immediately drawn to his mysterious ways. He is always intriguing, never quite giving away everything that’s going on in his mind, but always saying or doing something that leaves you wanting more. Tris’s friends, Christina and Will are fun and energetic, and just what you’d want for someone like Tris. And Tris’s enemies are just what you’d expect, callous and calculating, despicable, but fun to read.

In the second installment, Tris continues along her path of self-destructive behaviour, hoping to find the answers she is looking for. Is she as selfless as her abnegation parents? What does being Divergent mean? By asking herself these questions, she leads us along a journey where she searches for answers about being selfless in the name of love, and sacrificing yourself in times of war. The whole novel pits her against herself (as well as many other enemies) as she attempts to discover who she really is, and whether that’s who she wants to be or not. Roth writes about Tris and Four, “We both have war inside us. Sometimes it keeps us alive. Sometimes it threatens to destroy us.” The fact that these wars that are happening internally and externally all because of the traumas of their pasts drives this story further and deeper into the realm of a stunning story. Roth’s beautiful writing sets her apart from other YA authors, she finds sentimental and passionate ways of making her story’s theme heard. The second novel in the trilogy connects everything Tris has learned in the first book and adds another level of life lessons to learn, near the end, she says, “I have done bad things. I can’t take them back, and they are part of who I am. Most of the time, they seem like the only thing I am.” It is this vision of Tris that we are left with as we enter the third and final novel of the trilogy. So far brilliant, beautiful, and thought-provoking.

Finally, we reach Allegiant, the final book in the Divergent, the book some fans (including myself) have been waiting ages to read. I feel the need to write: SPOILER ALERT here, in case anyone hasn’t read this, but I hope that those who haven’t read it won’t go searching to read reviews. All the same, I’ll try not to give it all away. Where book one talked of bravery, and book two spoke of selflessness and war, book three speaks of self-sacrifice and what it really means. Tris learned in Insurgent that self-sacrifice isn’t giving up your life for no good reason. She realizes the error of what she did when she walked herself into Erudite headquarters, and knows that that would have been squandering the gift her parents died to leave her with. The gift of her life. So in this book, we learn all about Tris’s search for the perfect way to honour her family, to try to forgive her traitorous brother, and to learn that bravery doesn’t mean giving up. Tris learns her lessons through another series of very hard tests and tough decisions, but as usual she comes out on top of it all. She finally begins to understand her purpose in all of this war, and act the part of “Dauntless” that intrigued her so much when she joined. Roth brings everything full circle rather epically, reverting us back to the themes of the previous novels, answering the questions both Tris and Four had about fear and about bravery. She writes, “There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life. That is the sort of bravery I must have now.” This beautiful passage puts everything that Tris and Four have gone through into perspective. Then Roth continues with her amazing ‘lessons’ that she treats to her readers through this fascinating story, “She taught me all about real sacrifice. That it should be done from love… That it should be done from necessity, not without exhausting all other options. That it should be done for people who need your strength because they don’t have enough of their own.”

Without going into anymore detail for worry of spoiling too much, I will say that I loved the way Allegiant ended. When I finished it I immediately messaged my friend to complain, “How DARE Roth do that!!!??” We complained to one another. But the more we talked about it, the more I began to think, maybe it was the right thing to do. There was really no other way for her to end her trilogy if she wanted it to share the messages I believe she was trying to share from the start. To me, Roth was trying to teach all her readers about the importance of bravery and selflessness, about the complicated nature of good and evil, about the evils of war, and about self-sacrifice. And although I was at first incensed, I came to understand and even accept the ending as something close to perfect. No ends were left untied, and of course in a story like this, there could never really be a happily-ever-after, because it was never that type of story from the beginning. To me, this book ended in a way that, was upsetting, sure, because you grow attached to each and every character, you want to watch them grow and see how they change, but the fact that we were all so attached just proves how good a job Roth did at portraying her characters perfectly. Any book that ends leaving the reader bereft with grief over a fictional character is a job well done, in my eyes. And I don’t think anything Roth wrote was meaningless, or done to get a reaction, I believe she truly wrote what she believed was right for the story, and for that I commend her. And you have to admit, Veronica Roth has got some guts!!!

Overall, I thought the three books were amazing. Some compare here to Suzanne Collins, and rightfully so, they did both write similar stories at around the same time. However, in all honesty, the books couldn’t be more different outside of their Dystopian nature, and both are well written, beautifully executed, and well received, so any comparison, I can only assume would be graciously accepted. If you only had time to read one series of the two, I would be hard pressed to tell you which one I prefer. I actually think, overall, that the heroine in Divergent outshines even Katniss Everdeen in her willingness to do what is right, where Katniss is sometimes forced into that position, Tris takes it on eagerly. And I also find the love story in Divergent more appealing too because there is no choice to be made between Team A or Team B, there is love there for sure, but it isn’t the number one driving force behind the book. I will say that Collins was better at pacing the action throughout her trilogy and had fewer dull points in between the action sequences, so that was easier to read. Basically, both trilogies are worth the read so don’t make me choose, because I can’t.

Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark.

I had a hard time reading this book and have oddly super procrastinated writing this review. I sat down to write it this morning and shuddered at the fact that I had made my notes while reading Fault in Our Stars on March 18th. This book was exceptionally written and I poured through the pages in no time at all. I felt countless emotions while reading it: humor, sadness, anger, devastation. John Green has depicted life and death and love so honestly that his words resonated with me and you felt like you were living through the characters. You empathized with them, you laughed with them, and you mourned with them.

But I had a hard time reading this book because of my own grief I am currently living with following the tragically sudden death of my fiancé in October 2011. Hazel, Augustus, Isaac, the parents… all were living and breathing life and death so realistically that it hit incredibly close to home. Hazel’s story put into words the wretched nature of grief that so many of us live with and so many aspects of the story felt like they were my own story.

The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.

At times I felt like John Green was writing my story, writing this directly to me, and describing my grief in a way only I could understand. That is the powerfulness of his words. But I guarantee there are thousands of other people who felt the same thing as they read it. The beauty of this book is that you can take it personally, see yourself within the pages, and completely understand the depths of what Hazel’s story is. So many times I thought….. this is me!

The waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliffs, leaving me floating face-up on the water, undrowned.

As Hazel describes her journey with her illness and her impressions on the futility of life, you find yourself drawn in and you almost cannot comprehend how this young girl is so wise. Her illness, her brushes with death, and her losses have made her wise beyond her years in a way that only pain can. Any one of us who has experienced tragic loss or lived with a disease, either personally or through a family member, understands how dramatically pain changes you. John Green captures all of these emotions with ease and I think anyone who reads this would find it completely relatable to their lives.

What a slut time is. She screws everyone.

Even the concept of time was described in such a simple way and yet anyone who has experienced loss will understand it completely. There is never enough time. There are never enough tomorrow’s. When you have lost someone you understand the obsessive desire for just one more tomorrow. John Green captures this through his compelling words and you can’t help but be reminded how fleeting time is. I think that was the best part of this book for me — not how beautifully it was written, not how honest he describes the reality of life, not how intriguing the characters were, but how he tells life how it is in a no bullshit kind of way. There is no sugar coating loss, death, suffering, and struggle. Green is able to write this amazing story with complete honesty and makes no excuses for the reality of pain and one’s desperate need to cling onto time.

And then there is the love. While the main focus of this book is about understanding death, tragedy, and genuine courage, there is love. A sweet, romantic, teenage love story that can be seen as beautiful by a reader of any age. This is no sappy childish love story. This is one inundated with the harsh reality of their suffering and their unity over understanding the lurking sense of death. This especially resonated with me and I understand Hazel’s anguish of loss and her unfailing love even after a harsh separation.

I want to close by saying that I fully recommend this book to absolutely everyone, but prepare yourself to be changed, to feel sorrow, and to come away from it with a new appreciation of time, life, and love. I close with five final quotes that I cannot help but share. I dedicate these beautiful words to my love, my sweet Zach whom I will forever love and will always wish for one more tomorrow.

I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.

It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you

I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouln’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

I missed the future. I felt robbed.

From Lauren’s Perspective:

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” ~~ John Green in A Fault in Our Stars

It isn’t everyday you read a book that takes hold of you and grabs your attention and your passion and even steals a bit of your life away. It isn’t everyday that you are desperately happy not to fully enter the life of the characters you are reading. To feel such pain for them and hurt for them because of what they are suffering, to empathize with them and to relate to them, but to really not want to be them. Or to only want to be a part of them. It is not every day you get to feel that much for a character in a book at all. But the days I got to spend reading The Fault in Our Stars, I experienced all of that and more. This book is beautiful. This book is probably as close to perfect as they come. And while technically it is supposed to have been written for a younger audience, it is beautiful and intelligent and self-realizing in a way few adult books today are. It teaches. It shows you life from a point of view that most of us aren’t familiar with, that most of us thank whoever it is we believe in that we aren’t familiar with it. But it shows real life. True and real living. I beg everyone who reads this post to read this book. It’s one of the good ones.

“That’s the thing about pain…it demands to be felt.”

To give a brief synopsis of this novel, I won’t say much. I don’t want to spoil anything, and the plot is better left uncovered as you read. Simply, I will say, it is about a girl who is ill and her journey through life and love. It is about true love. It is about pain. It is about death and all that means to all people. In a rather poignant statement, Green writes through his main character Hazel, “There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.” It is in that statement that I can best describe this book.

“I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”

To start, I will state clearly, the characters were charming. Hazel Grace, the narrator is a rather precocious 16 year old girl. She is incredibly intelligent, well read, and has accepted her rather hazy fate, if in a slightly anti-social and depressive way. She is dealing with life’s problems the best she can, and her strength comes through on every page. It is her strength that drew me in. Her love of reading drives the novels plot forward, she says, “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” Through this love she discusses her favourite book, the one she reads over and over and over again for how it relates to her, how it makes her feel. Books, beside her budding love life, are the only place she finds any solace. She is a solitary person and her books give her comfort. The character of Augustus is also written perfectly. He is weird and strange in all the right ways. He is intelligent and happy and exactly the opposite of what you would expect an eighteen year old boy to be. Both he and Hazel have intense world views, and quite astute beliefs about death and what that means for everyone around them. They have, afterall, had a lot of time to think about it. Put the two together, and you have star crossed lovers, reminiscent of a Shakespearean tale. It is breathtaking. Even the books secondary characters, Hazel’s parents, Isaac, and the drunken Van Houten are delightful in their own way. But once again, I want you to discover them for yourselves.

“You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”

Finally, I will discuss the writing within the pages. I want to tell you how well I thought they were written. How amazing a wordsmith the author is. But I have shown you what I think already, by smattering this review with quotes from the story. Even those were a snippet of the beauty held within, I had a million more I wanted to add in somehow, but couldn’t for fear of giving away the story. The writing is brilliant. It is simple, easy enough for a young adult to understand, but poignant and thoughtful enough for anyone to read and take away beautiful realizations about their own lives. It is the kind of writing that I long for in a book. Simple. Beautiful. Filled with meaning.

It has been some time since a book has touched me in a way this book did. Please take the time to read it. It will be well worth your time. And hopefully you will learn something about true love, pain, and the unfortunate side effects of death.

“The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.” ~~ Robert Galbraith (or J.K. Rowling) in The Cuckoo’s Calling

From Lauren’s Perspective:

I’d like to start by saying how incredibly happy I am. Ecstatic. Thrilled. Overjoyed. A lot of books make me feel happy and giddy and all those wonderful things, but rarely does one make me feel them in this way. I’ll tell you why: I LOVED this book! Loved it! I was enthralled from the first to last word, and was barely able to put it down when I had other mundane things to do, like working and eating.

If you read this blog, you must know that I am a huge Harry Potter fan. Potterhead, I think they call it. I am obsessed with those books and can honestly say they changed my life. So, when The Casual Vacancy came out last year, I bought it immediately, knowing that J.K. Rowling couldn’t let me down. And she didn’t. Not really. But I say that having been unable to finish the book. It just didn’t interest me. I read the first 150 pages or so, but couldn’t get behind the story. The writing was beautiful, as Rowling’s words always are, but I just couldn’t make myself care about the characters. This was devastating for me. I wanted to be a Rowling fan, not just a Harry Potter fan, because her writing truly is beautiful. But here I was, with her first book post-Potter, and was completely unable to finish it.

Then, along comes this hidden gem of a book called “The Cuckoo’s Calling” by unknown author Robert Galbraith. It is found out months after its release that it was secretly written by none other than Rowling! Of course excitement in the publishing world grew and thousands if not hundreds of thousands of the book were printed within days to cover the overwhelming demand for the book. And this time, I have not one bad thing to say. With “The Casual Vacancy”, Rowling still had her wit and charm and beautiful use of the English language, but what was lacking was an appealing story, at least for me. “The Cuckoo’s Calling” brought back everything Rowling-esque from her Harry Potter books and gave it to us in a wonderful mystery full of intrigue and suspense. It was honestly delightful.

The writing was beautiful, Rowling’s insights into the world of fame and fortune were as apt as those insights about love and death found in the pages of all her Harry Potter books, She writes, “It’s an illness,” she said, although she made the words sound like “it’s uh nillness.” Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happening to Bristow’s mother… sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart.” Just absolutely beautiful.

I can honestly say I have never been happier to like a book in my life, and I can also say that I can not wait to read Coromander Strike’s next adventure, as Rowling has assured us that he will return.

To end, I will say with pride, and a great sigh of relief: ROWLING IS BACK! (Not that she ever really left :) )

“My heart started racing, not the bad kind of heart racing, like I’m going to die. But the good kind of heart racing, like, Hello, can I help you with something? If not, please step aside because I’m about to kick the shit out of life.” ~~ Maria Semple in Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

From Lauren’s Perspective:

I’m going to start somewhere I don’t usually start in these book reviews, I want to talk about the cover. Although I’ve never mentioned it before, I believe that the cover of a book can completely sell a novel. It can also completely ruin one. There are hundreds of books I have passed by, even if I thought I’d be interested in the story, because the cover is atrocious and I can only assume that means the text inside will follow suit. There are too many books out there for me to waste time on ugly artwork. So I thought I’d start by saying that this is one of the best covers I have seen in a long time. It drew me into the book before I even knew what the book was about, partly because of the beautifully contrasting colours, and partly because of the equally interesting title . Either way, whoever created this cover design: Well done. I think it will catch a lot of eyes, and don’t worry, what’s inside is every bit as beautiful and contrasting as the cover.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette? Is the story of a mother and daughter. It is the story of family dynamics, and the story of love. It is told from the point of view of Bernadette’s fifteen year old daughter, Bee, through correspondences between her mother and anyone who had been in contact with Bernadette leading up to her disappearance.

The layout of this book is fantastic. It does not read in regular prose, but instead, you read letters and emails passed between various characters. It is a fascinating and different way to learn about a characters personality and surprisingly easy to read. When I first began, I did think it might be hard to follow the seemingly haphazard style that Maria Semple undertakes, however, Semple does a beautiful job mixing in letters with regular prose, taking us back and forth between Bernadette’s point of view in all her correspondence, and Bee’s point of view in the space in between.

The book was an absolute pleasure to read, and when you add in Semple’s beautiful knack for writing, the story becomes impossible to put down. Semple writes in one of her more meaningful moods, “”That’s right,’ she told the girls. ‘You are bored. And I’m going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it’s boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it’s on you to make life interesting, the better off you’ll be.” It is through writing like this the the book really sold me. I have always appreciated a good story, even those that are sometimes not written all that well (*cough* twilight *cough* *cough*), and really, I will read almost anything (Except Ulysses. I tried. I really tried.) But when you throw together not only a wonderful story, but also beautiful prose; well that’s pretty much my heaven and it was close to perfect.

So far, here’s what you have learned from me, without giving away any spoilers: The plot is haphazard and jumpy, but brilliant. The writing is simply beautiful, it’s simple and beautiful. Now, what about the characters? I always find the most important thing (to me) in writing and reading characters is the ability to relate to the characters. Obviously I’m not going to relate 100% of the time to every character, but I like to find a part of myself in each of them, no matter how fantastical, as a way of truly being able to understand the characters. This book is a perfect example. Bee is an over achiever, brilliant just like her parents, and not the most popular girl at school. We have little in common, but I loved her. I loved her because I could be a bit of a loner like her, and in that I found a common bond. She is wonderfully written, precocious, and so smart you could die. And what’s weird, she has an amazing family dynamic, this amidst a story where her mother inevitably disappears. You find yourself yearning for friendships with your parents akin to the ones Bee experiences, and that’s an amazing thing.

Bernadette herself is perfect, in my opinion, because of her flaws. Her life is a little off kilter, but she stands tall and proud when people start accusing her of her life being off kilter. I love that. Confidence in a woman who knows she has worth despite the fact that she is going through a small mental breakdown. Reading some other reviews, I heard some people write that they didn’t like the character of Bernadette, that she was too whiny. I couldn’t disagree more. She is a strong woman who stands up for herself despite her fears. Yes, she makes some bad decisions, but she is intelligent and strong through it all. And honestly, I don’t find anything wrong with being a little crazy. Bernadette is so full of love, I don’t know how anyone could dislike her. She writes in a letter to Bee near the end of the novel the most perfect description of her passions and, through that, her beautifully broken mind, “Every single iceberg filled me with feelings of sadness and wonder. Not thoughts of sadness and wonder, mind you, because thoughts require a thinker, and my head was a balloon, incapable of thoughts.” Her mind was amazing, despite everything going wrong within it as well. As for the secondary characters, I won’t go into detail about them as they played an important role in the book and were written well, but were not nearly as interesting as the two main characters. I will say this about them: They all have flaws that are at once delightful and infuriating. They are all perfectly human.

In the end, all I want to finish by saying is this: Read this book. It is a beautiful tale of a mother and daughter, but it is also so much more. It is the story of a life going wrong, trying to pick up the pieces, but standing tall and proud throughout. It is a story of confidence in yourself, and having hope when hope is all but lost. Please pick up this book if you have the chance.